The Metropolitan Police, repeatedly and officially criticised over the past quarter century for being institutionally racist, has today launched what it calls its “London Race Action Plan”, which it says is “the next steps in becoming an anti-racist police service”.
Taking time: Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley
“To achieve this critical change once and for all will take time, but I am determined that we will continue to strengthen our relationship with black Londoners – whether that be members of the public or our own colleagues – and renew the principle of policing by consent,” Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said in releasing the plan.
The London Race Action Plan is an effort to rebuild trust with London’s black communities which the Met says have been “let down” over a number of years.
The plan includes a new stop and search charter, an overhaul of its policy on intimate searches on children and measures to help black victims of crime. The plan was drafted after consulting more than 2,000 people across the capital, including black communities and the Met’s black officers.
Excessive force: three adult police officers bundled 14-year-old Deshaun Joseph to the floor near a Croydon tram stop in 2022. The boy had committed no offence
Tensions over stop and search have included the prejudicial treatment of two black athletes, British sprinter Bianca Williams and her partner, Ricardo Dos Santos, which led to the dismissal of two Met constables in October 2023 after a disciplinary panel found their actions during a “highly distressing” stop and search amounted to gross misconduct.
In Croydon, one officer was convicted in court for assault during the arrest of a black woman at a bus stop in Selhurst last summer, an incident which was independently video’d and seen widely on social media. PC Perry Lathwood was not dismissed and continued to work within the area command despite complaints from community groups. Lathwood’s conviction was quashed earlier this month.
Trust in the force was also damaged after a 15-year-old black girl – known as “Child Q” – was strip searched while on her period at her school in Hackney in 2020. The new policy on intimate searches of children, would, the plans said, increase the “threshold and oversight, ensuring they only occur when necessary and proportionate”.
Other changes include improving how black victims of crime are treated, and building trust by “improving our empathy and cultural awareness”.
The Met aims for “improvements in how we record and monitor the ethnicity of drivers when making vehicle stops, with external scrutiny for greater transparency”.
And they say that to “better represent the communities we serve we’re working hard to recruit and retain a more diverse workforce that brings all the talents, experiences and perspectives of London to policing”.
Big Brother is watching: the Met’s Live Facial Recognition cameras are deployed in Croydon most weeks. Civil rights groups claim that the system is discriminatory
It is surely significant that the Met says that its London Race Action Plan is intended not just to make the service non-racist, but specifically “to become an anti-racist organisation”.
The plan, they say, “sets out across four pillars how the Met will better represent, respect, involve and protect black Londoners”.
As part of the plan, progress will be made publicly available via biannual updates.
Sir Mark said: “This plan publicly sets out our next steps towards becoming a truly anti-racist and inclusive organisation.
“Black Londoners have been let down by the Met over many years and while we continue to take steps in the right direction, there remains a long way to go and there is a lot more work to do.
“Action not words will rebuild trust in our service, so we must now remain focused on delivering real change that is seen and felt by our communities and our workforce.
“We are changing our systems, our processes, culture and our leadership. We are better understanding and acting on disproportionality wherever it exists. We are working more closely than ever with communities we’ve let down to build a service that delivers for all of London.”
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